My House of Horrors

A child’s thinking is more direct and less metaphorical. Could this drawing be an actual representation of the crime scene that he witnessed?

The house is black, meaning the time of the crime was at night, and the people inside the house are red—they probably represent his parents, the victims. This is the most direct interpretation.

Chen Ge tried looking at this painting from multiple angles. The boy had a hasty artistic style; all the human shapes looked the same and had no defining features. Chen Ge could not even tell their gender.

Wait, the red humans probably aren’t referring to his parents, there are way too many of them in the drawing. Chen Ge tried counting the number of red people, but every time he ended up with a different number. The drawing is too messy. What is the boy actually trying to communicate with it?

In the room, Fan Yu kept on repeating the same drawing. They were all about a black house and many red people. However, every time he was done, he would crumble up the drawings and toss them away as if he was dissatisfied with them.

Regardless, this painting is a crucial clue. Chen Ge came up with nothing even after studying the painting for a long time. He pocketed the drawing and glanced at the building behind him. The door, which he had left ajar, was now shut.

Both the aunt and the child are problematic in their own way. The question is… whose problem is bigger? Chen Ge got on the bus after escaping the maze-like paths. He was worried about his upcoming mission. If the woman was not lying to him, the test he was about to face that night would be incredibly difficult.

For the sake of safety, Chen Ge took out his phone to search for more information on Mu Yang High School online. He came up with quite a large amount of information, and most of it came from various school forums.

Based on the timeline, the posters probably were once students at Mu Yang High School, and after the school closed down, they were forced to change school and took the legends of Mu Yang High School along with them.

After a cursory glance, a few of them did capture Chen Ge’s attention. About one year ago, five students snuck into Mu Yang High School on a dare. They used their phones to record their experience, but instead of videoing the event, they updated a thread every few minutes.

The original thread had long since been removed, and Chen Ge was reading a shared post. According to rumors, they had entered the sealed classroom and started playing the game of Pen Spirit.

The five had sat around a table to summon the Pen Spirit, but as the game went on, there had ultimately been seven people standing in the classroom. No one knew where the additional two had come from, and the five ran out of the school, crying and yelling all the way.

Luckily, all five of them had survived the ordeal, but two of them seemed to have been traumatized from the incident. One of them had turned illogically violent while the other had acquired an irrational fear of daylight. Eventually, the two had moved out of Jiujiang.

Chen Ge looked at some of the comments under the post. A poster pointed out that during the game, two additional persons appeared, and in the end, there were two students who were traumatized. The poster suspected that the two who escaped were already someone else, and the original two were still trapped inside that classroom.

This speculation received many likes, but there were other opposing views as well. Some said all five had been possessed, but the two had stronger constitutions, and that was why they had acted weirdly.

There was a pinned message from a teacher that banned further discussion on Mu Yang High School. Chen Ge scrolled through the thread and realized there was one that was hidden.

Chen Ge opened it, and he was baffled by the content. The poster stated that his father’s company had planned to purchase the land on which Mu Yang High School was located for a low price. Initially, everything was fine, but when the contract was almost ready, his father would have the same dream every night. Many students wearing Mu Yang High School’s uniform would come to their house for classes.

The weird thing was, when they woke up, there was evidence of forced entry into their house. His father was so scared that he fell ill before finally resigning. That was the end of the story.

After reading all the posts, Chen Ge could not help but compare Mu Yang High School and Western Jiujiang’s Private Academy, since they were both schools, and he came to a weird discovery.

There were many supernatural rumors about Mu Yang High School online, but none of the stories mentioned death or injury. In comparison, while there was not much information on Western Jiujiang’s Private Academy online, the record at the police station showed that there was more than one death that had happened at the school.

If I really think about it, Western Jiujiang’s Private Academy does sound scarier. That was the only way Chen Ge could have made himself feel better.

Sitting on the bus and looking out the window, Chen Ge’s phone suddenly rang. He looked down and saw it was from He San.

The kid sensed the possible unlocking of a new scenario, so he called to book in advance? Chen Ge answered the call and placed his phone beside his ear. “Hello?”

“Boss, quickly get on the video-sharing app, someone is coming for your bread and butter!”

“Huh? There’s someone who is opening a new Haunted House?” Chen Ge clicked open the app, and before he was allowed entry into the homepage, an ad appeared on his phone—’Host, Qin Guang leads you to explore an actual haunted house!’

Chen Ge clicked on the screen and more details popped up.

Qin Guang was a famous livestream host on the platform. He had more than 600,000 followers, and most of his short videos had a humorous theme. On his personal bio, it stated that he belonged to XX Studio, and that studio was the same one who had tried to cozy up to Chen Ge earlier when he was at Ping An Apartments.

The ad explained that Qin Guang’s latest adventure was to branch into a new livestreaming territory, to host a mystery livestream inside an actual haunted house.

Chen Ge did not think too much of it at first, but when he saw Qin Guang’s first mystery location, he was speechless. Qin Guang’s team was going to livestream at Western Jiujiang’s Ping An Apartments.

“Boss, have you seen it? That man realized that you had more than ten thousand views on your first livestream, so he’s trying to copy your formula!” He San grumbled indignantly.

“There’s no need to worry, certain things cannot be copied.”

Chen Ge had thought He San was going to bring him some big news, so he was rather disappointed. He was not that worried about Qin Guang, although he also knew Qin Guang would not see him as competition either.

On the other end of the phone, He San said urgently, “He has so many followers. After he consolidates himself as a supernatural host, I’m afraid they’ll turn around and claim that it was you who copied them!”

“It’ll be fine. By the way, are you familiar with child psychology? I have a few questions for you.”

“Boss, what time is it, you still have the luxury to ask questions like that? Furthermore, I’m a forensic doctor. For questions of psychology, you should refer to psychologist or psychiatrist!”